Traditionally, residential and commercial customers acquire various content provider services over the Internet or other network directly from a content provider over the Internet or other wide area network provided by an Internet service provider. In such an arrangement, the customer must separately purchase Internet service from an Internet service provider and the desired content service from the content provider. Similarly, content providers, must rely on a customer to have Internet service to access and receive content provider services from the content provider.
Internet services would be activated to a customer premises before a customer can connect to the Internet via a gateway device. Conventional gateway devices come with pre-loaded firmware, or otherwise with some other pre-loaded configuration(s), by the service provider or manufacturer. These gateway devices must be shipped to a customer by the Internet service provider, or the customer must separately purchase such equipment. Moreover, once installed, the devices' functions are limited to their purpose-specific capacity as a residential or commercial gateway device. As a result, the gateway devices have limited upgradability, and in many situations, cannot be used between different service providers or to receive different types of services. This forces the customer to use multiple fixed-function service devices to receive upgraded or additional services, or alternatively to replace older equipment altogether.
Hence, there is a need for an adaptive solution to provisioning services to customers, and for content providers to offer their services to customers, without need either for multiple devices (or types of devices) and/or for replacing existing devices. Furthermore, there is a need to move the capability and functionality of gateway devices beyond their physical hardware implementations. In particular, a robust system is needed for provisioning services to customers and for content providers to offer their services to customers.